As the use of computers has become increasingly widespread in home and business environments alike, the need to interconnect such computers has also become important. For example, in a home environment, a user may be connected to a home network, such as a wireless network including, for example, one or more computers and perhaps one or more peripheral devices as well. Alternately, the user may be connected to a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet. Similarly, in business contexts, users often use networks to communicate both internally within the business as well as externally to customers, suppliers, etc. Indeed, computer networking is fast becoming the enabling technology for the next-generation personal computer experience as multi-media, connected or smart home, peer-to-peer, and collaboration technologies emerge and develop.
Computer networking, however, is often perceived as a technology that can be difficult to comprehend and is rampant with quality fluctuations in network connectivity. Unfortunately, it is now difficult, if not impossible, to measure and visualize the health status of a computer network, particularly from the standpoint of a user experience with the network. The best indicator of connection quality is often user interpretation of how long it is taking to access a particular network resource and whether the connection is taking longer than usual. This is obviously a subjective and inaccurate way to determine the quality of a particular network connection. Thus, there is currently no reliable way for a user to evaluate his/her network connection.
Known network rating systems require a user to download software for evaluating the network connection between the user's computer and a particular website. In this scenario, software is running on both the website computer and the user's computer. This software creates additional network traffic for a given period of time to evaluate the connection between the two computers. While it may be useful in evaluating the connection between the user's computer and a particular website, this type of evaluation tool cannot convey information about the user's connection to any other network node. Furthermore, it only provides the user information about the connection at a discrete point in time.
Moreover, such rating systems do not adequately provide information relevant to the user's actual networking experience. Users typically access a limited number of resources during any given network session. Thus, the user's connection to a test website may provide little, if any, information about his/her connections to other remote destinations that are actually used. Finally, since the user is given no indication of how distant the particular network computer is from the user's computer, the user is provided with no information regarding what his/her connection might be like for another network resource that is closer or farther away. Another drawback of such methods is its active and obtrusive nature. Typically, a large amount of test packets need to be generated in order to accurately determine the quality of a user's connection to that test website, thus creating a relatively large drain on system resources. The result is that the information provided by current network experience programs is not particularly useful for evaluating a user's network connection to any given network resource at any given time.
In other technology areas, such as wireless phone and data technologies, a visual meter is often used to indicate the strength of a signal. Due to the diversity and complexity involved in computer network connectivity, however, providing an indicia of what defines the quality of a computer network connection remains a challenging issue.